‘Small-budget movies have more original ideas than Marvel,’ said Dixon, who has written books about independent film and industry trends. Birdman was a technical marvel with its long takes and fluid camera motion. Boyhood took a risk in filming a family story over 12 years. The actors mature before your eyes. “’When you see a movie being made in which Superman meets Batman, that’s the sign of a genre collapsing into its baroque period,’ Dixon said.

‘Captain America and Spider-Man are [creatively] bankrupt.’ He compared it to the horror genre, which began with Frankenstein and Dracula but eventually doubled and tripled up on monsters to the point of ridiculousness.

Dixon said the Oscar shift has been going on for a while. When The Hurt Locker won best picture in 2009, it beat the digitally driven action fantasy Avatar, even though Avatar made 55 times more money — $2.7 billion globally . . . [Dixon noted that] big-budget tentpole movies ‘are committee movies that have to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Whiplash and Still Alice can afford to take risk[s] because they’re not going to break anybody’s bank.’

When they do catch fire, he said, the arty, independent films Oscar loves are increasingly being seen online and at home. ‘That’s the future. We’re going to see a real transformation of the Academy and what constitutes a movie, as film becomes more and more a solitary viewing experience.’”

In a guest opinion piece in Variety on January 28, 2015, Harvey Weinstein, producer extraordinaire, posted these thoughts on the collapse of the DVD market, and what Hollywood has to do to make up for loss of this revenue stream: “Every day we face new technology challenges. We have to look at our models — the theatrical model, the VOD [video on demand] model. We have to think about what we do with the lack of a DVD business. That was once an insurance policy for the industry. How do we deal with the newer technologies that are emerging and with the piracy that’s a part of the new digital age? Little by little by little, VOD is making up for the DVD business. It’s more challenging, but I think eventually the technology will catch up and equate to what we lost.

Obviously, all of these things weigh in on how much money you’re bidding on projects. You don’t know exactly what everything will be worth, so you have to go with your pure gut. If a movie grossed $5 million in theaters, it used to mean that it would do $5 million on DVD. Now, with EST {Electronic sell-through; a method of media distribution whereby consumers pay a one-time fee to download a media file for storage on a hard drive] and VOD and everything else, who knows what you’re going to carve out? The theatrical business is now the biggest profit center. If you don’t win in theaters, you’re in trouble.

The movie dictates its own release strategy. You have to know what you have and be careful how much you spend on P&A [prints and advertising]. The Internet has become an incredibly effective marketing tool, but it’s also the source of greatest competition. There’s limitless content out there, so it’s easy to stay home and watch all these things. You have make a case for why your movie is compelling. What Radius-TWC [Radius-TWC; a the boutique label dedicated to simultaneous multi-platform VOD and theatrical distribution, started by The Weinstein Company] is doing with VOD is finding new ways to reach an audience. Nobody has time anymore. They’re pulled in so many directions. If they want to see a movie at 11 at night while the kids are asleep, this is the way to do it. It’s become an important source of income.

We’re entering a golden age for television. You can tell a better story there. You have more time. I can’t tell Marco Polo in under 50 hours. I wouldn’t know how to do anything other than offer up an abridged bad version of that. Let’s hope all technology companies follow Netflix’s model and marry content and technology with the same passion.” So, the new things out there are not only VOD, which has been around for a while, but also the actual, and legal downloading of files you store on your hard drive, or electronic sell-through. Already, many sites, such as Vimeo are doing this with HD video; iTunes and Amazon have been doing this in their own way for quite some time. But now it’s taking over the market. It’s the future, as I’ve said before; like it or not, physical media is becoming a niche product – if that.

As Steven Zeitchik and Amy Kaufman of the Los Angeles Times observe, “Summer moviegoing is usually about the stars, the spectacle and the sizzle. But in a trend that’s mystifying Hollywood, this summer’s box office is being driven by films with modest ambitions, including relatively inexpensive comedies, lower budget animation and horror pictures. Call it the summer of the B-movie. Like the quickie flicks the studios used to crank out for the back end of double features, these new hits —The Purge, The Heat, Grown Ups 2, Despicable Me 2 and, as of this weekend, The Conjuring among them — are drumming up business while bigger-budgeted offerings such as The Lone Ranger and Pacific Rim struggle to sell tickets.

It’s these smaller films that have helped summer box-office receipts climb by 14% over last year, defying the conventional wisdom that summer is the time when audiences mainly want to see movies that are big, loud and laden with costly special effects. Several factors may be behind the turnabout, according to Hollywood analysts, including studios doing a better job of serving niche audiences and consumers experiencing blockbuster fatigue. ‘Everything looked watered down and the studios were left trying to distinguish their movies,’ said Ted Mundorff, chief executive of Landmark Theatres.

This weekend the trend seems to be hitting its apex. R.I.P.D., a supernatural science fiction comedy starring household names Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges that cost at least $130 million to make, is projected to take in less than $15 million at the box office. Meanwhile, The Conjuring, a paranormal-themed film made for the horror faithful at one-seventh the budget, is expected to collect as much as $35 million.”

None of this surprises me; when I look at my own viewing, the unexpected hits are the ones I’ve been seeing, and blogging about, and the other films strike me as boring and unimaginative. When you have too much money, you take fewer creative risks because too much is at stake. Too many people become involved, and you just keep throwing money at the film until it’s finished, as with The Lone Ranger, even if the entire project has gone off the rails.

When you have $4 million, as with The Purge – I heard $3 million, actually – you have to use your creativity and improvise on the spot, because you don’t have the time or the money – you have to get it and move on. All the money in the world, and all the empty spectacle in the world, can’t make up for original ideas, craft, passion, and energy, which usually comes from having less to fall back on.

The studios need to rethink their strategy, which is a throwback to the 1950s, when television threatened theater attendance. 20th Century Fox decreed that all future films would be made in CinemaScope, Warner Bros. rushed House of Wax into theaters in 3-D, and Cinerama was born. It worked for a few years, and then burned out. And after the fall, what was the Academy Award winner for Best Film of 1955? Marty, a small little film that could just as easily have worked on television, but audiences wanted to see it, so they went out to theaters in droves, making the modest little film a hit.

Marty even won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. But Hollywood still thinks bigger is always better, and that bombastic CGI effects will always stun audiences into submission, but that strategy is beginning to play to diminishing returns: the “wow” or dazzle factor has worn off. People are getting tired of destruction. The studios always want to cash in on the past, as if by simply remaking a hit film, the same thing will work in the future. Sometimes it will, as with the Bond franchise, but sometimes it doesn’t — and a little bit of creative energy is more than welcomed by both audiences and critics. I hope it’s the start of a trend.

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. All comments by Dixon on this blog are his own opinions. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him at wdixon1@unl.edu or wheelerwinstondixon.com